


ad astra per aspera

by TrulyCertain



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 10:43:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15772506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrulyCertain/pseuds/TrulyCertain
Summary: A skinny kid from the Tenth Street Reds, and becoming Shepard.





	ad astra per aspera

This is what John thinks of, when he looks through a window on the Normandy and out into space: 

He thinks of being a hard-scrabble kid with too many scars, watching friends die because of red sand or because of smuggling it. He thinks of the first time he felt a gun against the back of his head, turned and saw a friend holding it. He thinks of the gang tats and the pain of getting them removed, afterwards, and the way he clung to his dog tags and barely made a sound, even though in his head he was screaming, screaming, screaming.

And he’s fifteen and sitting against a wall, looking up at the sky through the smog and dust, and thinking,  _Huh. There are people up there._ He remembers reading old Earth fiction about space travel, and yeah, maybe he read the Alliance pamphlets when they came round. Apparently they spammed datapads, but it wasn’t like he could afford a decent one, so he never got the system update - or maybe he just missed it, he doesn’t know. He’s never been much good with that kind of tech. Anyhow, he builds ships in his head, then, works them up from imaginary blueprints and then girders. Part of him wonders how the hell those things stay in the air, but part of him knows - he spent years taking old books about that kind of thing, and sure it was illegal but he was never going to know otherwise. He builds ships in his head, and then he starts to build the people.

(Later, when he’s twenty-nine and people are telling him he saved the galaxy, he’ll build models instead. Put them together in his quarters with shaking hands and think that he could just never get the tailfins right when he was a kid. And he never accounted for the complexity of a decent FTL engine, not really. Those things are huge, and you can feel the floor under your feet vibrate when you stand near one, even with all the safety guards.) 

Yesterday he walked past the Alliance recruitment posters with some of the others, and he’d laughed about it being propaganda bullshit too, because he wanted to be alive tomorrow. But he’d wondered, and he’s still wondering. It’s not like he’s got anything to lose.

He was right, though, even then: it’s all bullshit. He builds people in his head, but none of them are a too-skinny kid who steals books, when he’s not stealing everything else, and sleeps on cardboard in alleys with his dirty, falling-apart boots still on. He laughs under his breath at the thought of someone like him getting stripes, getting patted on the back, the way some of them do in the stories. Shit, they’d probably kill him if they knew half of what he’d done.

The first time he sees a quarian, he only just stops himself staring, because he’d heard of them but he’d never seen one on Earth. Sure, turians and krogan and everyone else, but never a quarian. He thought they lived in fleets, travelled pretty far from here. He thinks that he’s never spoken to one. And he wonders about how it is that, even with the fact he watched his best friend snap a guy’s neck yesterday, the world can still surprise him. It makes him feel better, somehow. Makes him forget about the shaking and the blood. And he wonders who else is out there that he’s only heard stories of, maybe not even that. He thinks of planets he’s never been to, people he’s never met. 

 _Yeah, kid, that’s the trouble,_ he remembers Sal telling him once.  _You like people too much. Means you’re good for deals but you can’t take what the deals mean afterwards, can’t clean up._

And John’d shaken his head and said,  _I like people. Doesn’t mean I trust them._

He’s seventeen, getting a gun pressed into his hands and told to deal with a problem. That problem didn’t do anything wrong except try to tell the truth about the Reds’ stranglehold on this neighbourhood; didn’t even hurt anyone. His hands are shaking, and he’s thinking that he can’t talk his way out of this one, and they’re saying the same, grinning,  _but it’ll be all right, kid, you got a lot of your father in you, just don’t think too much._ And he’s looking up at the sky while his boss walks away, building ships and stars and skies in his head and wishing he was somewhere, anywhere else. Because you don’t disobey the Reds. And you don’t lie to them, either.

So, it’s either his last night on Earth or someone else’s, depending on how brave he can be, and he’s spending it reading old books - some story about a kid who gets to go and see stuff he never expected, gets to be some kind of wizard, hundredth printing or so, and hell, when he was eleven he was running red sand and trying to duck past the mercs, so just being stuck in some cupboard under a staircase, in an actual house, seems like the fantasy part even without the magic - and doodling stars on some napkin he grabbed from the bins outside a restaurant. That’s when he sees it on a screen.

The recruitment drive. Ships leaving for the training centre at the Citadel, tonight.  _Propaganda bullshit,_ he thinks, running past the blaring holoscreens and back to the shithole he and ten other people call home. Grabbing his stuff and making sure no-one else was around and then running to the office. Abandoning the gun there, turning out his pockets and leaving packets of red sand in his wake.  _Propaganda bullshit,_ he thinks, signing his name on the virtual dotted line and not even blinking when he lies about his age. 

 _Last night on Earth,_ he thinks with a bitter half-grin as the ship lifts off. He realises too late that he’s left the book, too, but there’ll be other books. There’ll be whole libraries. He doesn’t know why it’s so hard to watch locks of hair falling to the floor, but it is. When they start shaving his head, he shuts his eyes, and thinks of stars.

Turns out joining the Alliance is just getting another gun shoved into his hands, but they say stuff about peace and  _never use force if you don’t have to,_ and somewhere along the way he starts believing it. By the first time he steps foot on a ship on his first decent posting, he hasn’t taken his dog tags off in days, and he carries an assault rifle rather than the cobbled-together pistol he did back home. He shook in his boots the first time he saw the Citadel, got kind of a headrush when he stepped onto it, but now, somewhere different, he just presses his hands to the wall, feels the low vibration of the engines, and thinks of new colonies.

Years later, when he’s spitting out blood on Akuze and listening to friends dying screaming, again, for the first time in years, and he’s got injuries that the one smear of medigel left can’t help, he thinks of never seeing other suns, new worlds, new people, and he crawls.

(Sometimes he closes his eyes and he’s still crawling.)

They call him  _Shepard_ after that, mostly. Sometimes it’s with a little awe and  _you were on Akuze, weren’t you_ , while he tries not to think of the blood and the dirt and the crawling. He stops trying to change that. Sometimes he thinks he might forget his own first name. He washes the blood off his hands and tries not to freeze up when they say,  _that’s Shepard,_ like he’s someone worth admiring.

After he talks some scared salarians ( _Korun and Mello_ , they tell him their names are, eventually) down from shooting the guns they found at the sight of unidentified Alliance personnel, he gets called into the captain’s office.  _You’re one of the good ones, Shepard,_ his captain says, matter-of-fact and without the scared awe. There’s something in there, though, that might be… pride? And John blinks and mumbles,  _I, uh, thank you, Captain. Just doing my job,_ while Anderson looks like he might be trying not to laugh.

John watches sunrises on Mars, sits with a quarian and listens to her talk about her pilgrimage, watches a turian get his clan markings. He gets asked where home is and says the name of the ship he’s on.  _Earth_ is an afterthought.

 _John,_ he hears, for the first time in a long while. And it’s a quarian, part of the crew -  _his crew,_ though that still feels weird to think - saying it. Because, as he’d said,  _I’m not your CO, Tali, you don’t have to call me Shepard._ Something warm rises in his chest, something he can’t explain, but he’s barely started thinking about what it might mean when he gets spaced.

It seems right, somehow, dying out here. He laughs bitterly at it. He wants to say he goes calmly, but he’s screaming and calling out for anyone who’ll listen and scrabbling at his helmet. Even though he’s kicking out, some part of him is thinking  _Least it’s not some alley on Earth_ and  _Least I got to see the stars._ And they flash behind his eyelids when his vision goes.

John looks out of a window on his ship, bracing his hands against what looks like glass but isn’t - and he’s thirty, nearly thirty-one, and so damn  _tired_ (and fifteen and dreaming, and seventeen and scared, and twenty-one and twenty-nine and all of it at once). He was asked once if it bothered him, having such a direct view - if it made him think of getting spaced. The truth is, it does. And it makes him remember that there’s more than the blood on his hands and the politics; makes him think that somewhere out there there’s a Fleet with the woman he loves on it; makes him remember that he isn’t crawling; makes him remember that he went and he saw and he’s breathing.

He remembers Ash quoting, once, “ _I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees.”_

He remembers saying back, quietly, “ _Come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die.”_

And she’d grinned in surprise, bright in the dimness of the mess.  _Didn’t take you for a poetry kind of guy, skipper._

He’d smiled back, remembering old books and old daydreams. _I’m a ships kind of guy,_ he’d said, because it was simpler.

He thinks of Ash, wherever she is, and the others out there, somewhere he can’t see. He wonders if he’ll see them again. And when he sleeps, he dreams of stars.


End file.
